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6 Reasons Bamboo Is Better for a Privacy Screen than Any Other Plant
Do you need privacy from a neighbor, busy road, or construction site? Many people use screening plants to form a living wall or evergreen hedge instead of a traditional fence to accomplish this. Many times plants are better than fences because they won't rot, generally aren't subject to municipal height restrictions, and are much more pleasant to look at. Typical plants used are Leyland Cypress, Green Giant (Arborvitae), Holly, Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria), Deodar cedar, wax myrtle, ligustrum, tea olive, camellia, laurel, and more. Bamboo is better than all of these, and here are a few reasons:
1. It Grows Faster
Bamboo is the fastest growing land plant in the world. The record is 47" in a day and 16" in an hour. While you probably shouldn't expect those types of figures, you can be sure than bamboo will establish and grow faster than the fastest growing alternative. You'll wait years longer for the other screening plants to size up.
2. It Is More Consistent and Even
Because bamboo is a grass, if spreads through rhizomes and as it matures fills in gaps and matures to a consistent height, texture, and density. On the contrary, when you're planting singular plants, they all have different growth rates according to sun and water, which can vary greatly from one section to the next. Inevitably, with a tree or shrub one will die due to disease or storm damage, and your privacy screen will end up with a big gaping hole.
3. It Is More Flexible on Spacing
Other woody evergreens need to be planted according to their size at maturity or else the trees will grow together and look bad, as well as increase risk of disease. Not so with bamboo. You can strategically place your initial bamboo plants where they provide maximum security, such as the line of sight between a bathroom window and the neighbor. The bamboo rhizomes will do the rest to fill in the gaps.
4. It Lasts Longer
Temperate bamboos last hundreds of years, and only flower every 80 years on average. Most of the screening plants grow quickly but have very short life cycles. Therefore you spend years waiting for them to size up, are able to enjoy just a few years with them providing privacy while hoping one doesn't get a disease or ice or wind doesn't knock if down, and then they go into decline. We've installed bamboo for multiple clients to plants screening trees such as Leyland Cypress that were already having them reach the end of their life cycle.
5. It Is More Resilient to Drought, Heat, Cold, Snow, and Ice
Bamboo is a very tough plant. In the summer it is able to withstand the hottest temperatures, its rhizome system able to transport water from one area to the next. In stormy weather such as tornados and hurricanes they will bend with the wind and have low rates of breaking. In the winter temperate bamboos are extremely hardy, with some species hardy all the way to -20°F! Every temperate bamboo we sell has a minimum hardiness of 5°F. When winters storms come, bamboo culms are extremely strong and flexible. They're stronger than steel and as flexible as carbon fiber. So instead of having to try and bear the weight of feet of snow or inches of ice, they simply bend over and can almost lie flat on the ground. Then the winter precipitation melts, they pop back up. Not so with other woody plants which are much more rigid and brittle and end up blowing over, splitting, losing branches, etc.
6. It Is a Better Value - More Bang for the Buck
Plant-for-plant, bamboo is more expensive than most other competitors. I bet you didn't think we'd admit that there. It's true, and the reason is that because temperate bamboo doesn't normally grow from seed, we must dig the divisions by hand, which is tedious and backbreaking and doesn't experience the ease of growing in mass numbers of large greenhouses like the alternative. That being said, it is still a better value than other plants when you consider all the factors above.
If we can help you with questions about screening, including which species, what size, and spacing, please contact us here.
If we can help you with questions about screening, including which species, what size, and spacing, please contact us here.